Hi there. I’m usin gfresh wheat flour in cupcakes (soft wheat), and the cupcakes collapse to such an extent that I have to turn the pan over to get then out, and the tops are sunken into the pan. I substitute 15% by weight of potato starch in the recipe (golden butter cake), and my soft wheat has 9g protein per serving (which I believe is one cup).

I’ve tried the German Chocolate cake from Heavenly cakes with that combination, which I would think would be more sensitive to structural problems. That cake performs just fine; no problems noted. However I haven’t tried making cupcakes out of them. Should I try mixing in a little bit of high-protein wheat or forgo the potato starch to try and get more structure into the cupcakes?

The ger choc cake works well with a variety of flours because it’s a sponge-type cake, which means that a lot of structure comes from eggs. Also, it’s made with oil, which means that the flour can be either bleached or unbleached. The gluten development will affect the tenderness of the cake, but with the eggs it isn’t the only thing that the cake relies on for structure.

For the golden butter cream cake, the type of flour is much more important, not only protein content, but also the flour has to be bleached. If your wheat flour is unbleached, you’ll need to either switch to a bleached flour or heat treat it to get it to work in recipes with softened butter.

Also, I haven’t tried the golden butter cream cake recipe as cupcakes, but a number of bakers on the forum who have tried it have reported that it doesn’t work well for cupcakes. You can search the forum for more info and examples.

To learn more about how to best deal with unbleached flour in cake baking, search over on the blog for “Power of Flour”, there are several parts.